Friday, January 2, 2009

Resurrection of a machine

Our old laptop has looked like this for a while now:


It's hard to tell from the picture, but the screen is dead and so are the LEDs. We paid $2000 for a very nice laptop in 2005, and it breaks off a $0.20 power adapter. The Toshibas of that era have power connectors that are soldered to the motherboard. Every time you plugged or unplugged the power cord, it strained the soldier joints, and eventually they break. I fixed the laptop once, but it didn't stay fixed for more than a few weeks.

After digging on the Internet, I finally found the pictures (sorry, but I couldn't find the link again...) that suggested soldering a wire instead of replacing the silly Toshiba part. I didn't take a picture of the soldier joint, but here's an out-of-focus picture of the wire job:



I did break one rule: I used a sound plug (a 0.25" mono plug, to be exact). I did at least make the power cord the female plug, so that at least there's less dangers of shorting out:


Now, it works, for as long as it'll hold:

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